Schlitz beer served in a bar in Schlitz Park
The 1894 Pabst Mansion has 37 rooms
Polish sausage costumes and race during games within retractable-roofed American Family Field. And with beers in hand, visitors can join 45-minute tours in and around the brewing tanks at Lakefront Brewery. The city’s most notable brewing legacy can be seen at the Pabst Brewery Complex, once the largest lager beer producer in the world. It’s where 30 or so mid-19th to early 20th-century brick buildings, some with square towers and battlements, remain today, although now housing offices, retail businesses, and residential space. Similarly, the “Cream City brick” buildings in nearby Schlitz Park, once home to the Joseph Schlitz Brewing Company where “The Beer that Made Milwaukee Famous” was made, as the saying goes, also leases office space. The Brewhouse Inn & Suites occupies the former Pabst brewery building—a spectacular reuse with the tops of original copper brewing tanks spiffed up and shining in the hotel’s second floor atrium. Crushed beer bottles make up a lobby counter, with sharply-cut beer bottle bottoms studding the walls by the reception desk. Born in Saxony, Germany, in 1836, Frederick Pabst came to America at 12 years old and eventually became a ship captain, thus earning a title he would use for the rest of his life. He married
a daughter of the president of Best Brewing Company and bought into his father-in-law’s business, later renamed in Pabst’s honor. Pabst’s former corporate offices are now “Best Place,” an event venue and gift shop named after brewery founders Jacob and Phillip Best. A statue of a goateed Captain Pabst stands in a courtyard. Owner Jim Haertel says Best Place looks like a 17th-century hall and calls it the “Sistine Chapel for Beer” because of the frescoes on the walls. “I love the history and the breweries,” he says. “There’s just a part of me that wants to preserve this piece of Americana and share it.” The 1892 Pabst Mansion, a grand Flemish Renaissance Revival-style home with 37 rooms and 14 fireplaces, remains open today. Its lavish interior includes gold-leaf woodwork and moldings in Mrs. Pabst’s French Rococo-style parlor used as a ladies’ retreat after dinners, and Captain Pabst’s “Smoking Room” with oak and walnut decorative German Renaissance panels as a tribute to his heritage. “Milwaukee was 60% German and this street was about 90% German,” notes tour guide Gary Strothmann. “There were about two dozen German newspapers to about a dozen English-speaking. So, this was kind of like living in Germany.” Milwaukee also boasts its proud heritage founded in the city: Harley-Davidson
ON THE WISCONSIN WATERFRONT
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